Postdigital cross border reflections on critical utopia

Abstract

Critical pedagogy is in crisis. To address this crisis, this paper reinvents Paulo Freire’s concept of utopia in and for our age of the Anthropocene. Understood as a system, postdigital critical utopia provides us with normative foundations and returns agency from invisible data and algorithms to human beings. Understood as a process, postdigital critical utopia unmasks the myth of neutrality and adds an important element of myth, religion, ritual, and faith. Understood as an orientation, postdigital critical utopia needs to be balanced by dystopia, integrate environmental considerations, and act with a combination of epistemical curiosity and hope. Theoretical and practical attempts at introducing advanced technology to reimagine new utopias now take place in media theory, hacking, activism, and small pockets of the academia. To transcend its own crisis and remain relevant, contemporary critical pedagogy movement must urgently join these attempts. However, catching up with technological development is only the tip of a much larger iceberg. In order to take the lead in processes of modernization, critical pedagogy movement needs to actively develop utopian visions and techno-administrative systems which may support these visions.     

Posthumanism,open ontologies and bio-digital becoming: Response to Luciano Floridi’s Onlife Manifesto

In The Onlife Manifesto: Being Human in a Hyperconnected Era Luciano Floridi and his associates examine various aspects of the contemporary meaning of humanity. Yet, their insights give less thought to the political economy of techno-capitalism that in large measure creates ICTs and leads to their further innovation, development and commercialization. This article responses to Floridi’s work and examines political economy of the blurred distinction between human, machine and nature in the postdigital context. Taking lessons from early history of the Internet across the Eastern and the Western Bloc, it examines ideological underpinnings of development of information and communication technologies. The paper points towards the postdigital challenge of the rising importance of biological sciences, their mutual connection with information sciences, and the society at large. It introduces the concept of bio-informational capitalism, and closely examines the relationships between biology and information. Based on authors’ previous works the chapter introduces the concepts of homo economicus and homo collaborans, and claims that their mutual differences do not make a case for a dualist philosophy—instead, the two concepts should be understood as opposite poles of a continuum. However, it shows that the biological challenge is not a mere continuation of our existing (research) questions, and that it introduces new postdigital ways of understanding our reality. In conclusion, the chapter calls for developing a new, postdigital language of inquiry, which reinvents the digital challenge and invents its relationship to biology.     

后数字时代的教育研究

目前,教育研究面临着大数据和算法的挑战。通过数据收集和操作的自动化处理,大数据和算法带来新的研究机会。然而,这些机会受到各种数据和算法偏见的严重制约。大数据和算法引入新的机遇和限制,很大程度上改变了当代教育研究。这些转变与教育政治、教育政策和教育实践等辩证地交织在一起。我们从事研究和应用研究的方式之间存在错综复杂的相互作用,这带来一系列哲学、方法论和实践上的全新问题和挑战。在混乱且变化莫测的后数字状况下,研究、政治、政策和实践处于永恒的互动之中,不能脱离彼此。在后数字时代,教育研究人员应抓住机会,以负责任和可持续的方式引领这些变革。